#Blaugust2024

(Bl)August 2024 Wrap Up and September 2024 Goals!

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Whew, I can’t believe August is over already. With it go the last remnants of summer. Break out the Halloween decorations! Take out those hoodies! Bring on the Pumpkin Spice EVERYTHING!!

I love Fall, can you tell? Summer is great and all but we only get so many months of warm weather in Northeast Ohio so we tend to try and pack in as much outdoor activities as possible. This summer was full of concerts, trips to the zoo and the beach and then back to the zoo. Every weekend was booked from the end of May until right now. I’m so ready for a nice break.

I took part in Blaugust this year which was a rousing success. I skipped last year completely, so it was nice to rejoin the event again. My participation was for wholly selfish reasons, to inspire me to write more than I have been. Considering I’m writing this post, I’d say that was a success. I managed to write 22 posts last month which was above and beyond the goal of 10-15 posts I set for myself at the start of things.

Spending all of my time on my own writing meant I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to check out other blogs participating this year, especially all the new ones. When I did, I tended to stick to the blogs I’ve been reading for years anyways. It’s something I would like to work on for next year for sure.

My initial thought is, if I spend more time throughout the year writing I won’t feel compelled to cram it all in one month..or…and hear me out on this one….I might be able to plan better and give myself more time to read all those other blogs. Time will tell!

As always, thank you Belghast for organizing and putting on this awesome event year after year!

Top 5 Games in August

GameHoursTotal % of Time Played
Guild Wars 220h47%
No Man’s Sky11.5h27%
Dragon Age: Origin7.5h18%
Hunt: Showdown2h5%
Disney Dreamlight Valley1.5h3%

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t think I’d have enough games to fill this chart this month.

I knew Guild Wars 2 and Dragon Age: Origins would be up there because I’ve written a bunch of posts about those. No Man’s Sky being in second was a bit of a shock. I know I wrote a few posts about it too but if you asked me to guess before I put together this list I would have said Dragon Age would be higher. It makes sense though, it was the Squads’ weekend game this month.

I gave Hunt: Showdown another try this month and it fell flat for me. I don’t think I’ll be returning to it anytime soon even though it does have an awesome soundtrack. Disney Dreamlight Valley was vying for 5th against 3 other games that had a little less than an hour in them but the new Star Path that came out this month has had me logging in to the game every few days for a quick check. Earlier this year, it would have been higher on the list but my interest in that particular genre has waned since the beginning of summer.

September 2024 Goals

  • Finish the Heart of Thorns story. This one is a bit of a gimmie because I’m pretty sure I’m nearing the end of it anyways.
  • Continue my Dragon Age: Origins play through. I’m not naive enough to think that I will be anywhere close to finishing this game by the end of the month. Who knows, I may never start it up again. Such are the whims of my interests!
  • Don’t go dormant! aka post at least 1 time a week in September. Now that I’m back at it, I don’t want to lose momentum but I also don’t want to set a goal to high for myself the first month post Blaugust. Boom! Got the first week covered already.
  • Bonus Goal: Finish the Living World Season 3 because I think I’m very close – very, very, very close to the end of Heart of Thorns already…

Minor Technical Difficulties

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So I started a new play through of Dragon Age: Origins this week on PC. It’s only been about 13 years since my last one and that was on the PS3 so it’s basically like my first time through all over again. It’s been a while since I booted up an older game (ya, ya 2010 is old now). It’s amazing how many thing I take for granted that just work with games now.

Borderless Window for one. Dragon Age either runs in Full Screen or a window. I can’t stand playing games in window mode, everything looks so small and seeing my messy desktop breaks that immersion! So that option was out.

Let me tell you, Dragon Age does not take kindly to switching to other applications when in full screen mode. Every time I went to take a note it was a gamble whether or not the game would come back up. Either the game would crash to desktop when the window was opened back up. It was a fifty-fifty shot whether I’d get back in. To get around that, I used the SimpleNote app on my phone to take notes even though I had the desktop version open on my second monitor.

It felt a bit silly but you gotta do what you gotta do, you know. That’s the plight of the game blogger.

Speaking of plights, Dragon Age doesn’t support Steam Screenshots. I found this out when I hit F12 to take one and the game crashed yet again! So I went to my backup option, Greenshot. It’s free, it takes screenshots, it even puts them in a folder for you. I typically only break this guy out when I’m playing games through Epic because that still doesn’t support screenshots. Unfortunately Greenshot, wasn’t really working while Dragon Age was in full screen. When I went to take a screenshot everything would freeze up for a few seconds. I’m noticing a trend here…

I thought maybe I could suck it up and play in windowed mode. Greenshot appeared to be working there. Appeared is the key word here. When I went to look at my screenshots they were not what I was expecting:

I was about to call it a day. But on my next launch of the game I saw the familiar green logo in the corner of my screen for the Geforce Experience overlay. I have only seen this thing in action once and that was last week where it kept saving clips of me being killed in Hunt: Showdown. I had no clue I could also use it to take screenshots and, surprisingly, it worked without an issue in full screen. It does save them to the Videos folder in Windows which I find weird but other than that it works!

Which brings me to my last pain point with this aging title: It. Kept. Crashing! Well most of it was my fault, I’ll admit, trying to swap applications while it was running BUT it also crashed while playing a few times. I managed to get past the starting zone of Orzammar – I’m playing a dwarf rouge by the way – and to the surface to join the Grey Wardens. This about 1.5 hours in to things when the game crashed while I’m running around trying to find my next plot point. It had been a little while since I saved and even longer since the auto save saved so I found myself losing some time.

That’s when I remembered that these older titles usually have some sort of mod or stability patch that makes them run better on newer hardware/ Windows versions. So off to the internet I went to find one. The first Google result lead me to the 4GB LAA Patch for Dragon Age: Origins which let’s the game access more than 2GB of RAM. For the EA and GOG versions of Dragon Age there’s a little program that needs to be run on the Dragon Age .exe.

Since the Steam version is encrypted you need an unencrypted version of the .exe which I found on NexusMods. I found the guy’s video on how to install the patch confusing so I went to try and find a write up somewhere. Lucky for me, there was a 10 year old Steam thread that detailed how to to it, which in all honesty, was very easy. Now that I have it patched, the game hasn’t crashed once in the last few hours.

Hooray!

Weird Bug Creatures and Stuff

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Earlier this month, I wrote about how No Man’s Sky didn’t have much to offer in the way of multiplayer. I still think that rings true, but the Liquidators Expedition does solve some of the problems I have with it. Mainly, the shared goals, well sort of.

The Squad has been picking our way through the latest expedition which is set to end on September 2nd. So far, most of us have made it to Phase 4 out of 5.

This Expedition is suppose to take you through worlds that showcase the latest graphical and procedural generation update. We have visited some interesting places, my favorite being the starting world with a giant floating eye creature and islands floating everywhere. We’ve also seen planets made up of mostly water with huge waves and even bigger underwater creatures. Other planets may not have been memorable but they did show off the new flora and fauna combinations.

The Liquidators Expedition focuses heavily on combat. Each phase of the expedition has you traveling to a drop zone, which spawn bug creatures that you need to eliminate. Then you have to travel to an infestation site to shoot even bigger bug creatures! Each phase has an optional goal of killing x number of bug creatures too.

There’s been a whole lot of shooting things the last few weeks.

Combat, inherintly, lends itself as a great multiplayer activity. It’s certainly easier to take on the swarms with a few friends. There isn’t much structure to it, nothing to really plan for, just go out there and shoot the bugs until there aren’t any more bugs! The big boss bugs add some variety, they have armor that needs to be shot off before they take damage so there’s an option for coordination but it’s not strictly required.

The shared Milestones for each phase of the expedition also lean in to a more focused multiplayer experience. It would be nice if these were actually shared between the party playing together so each person didn’t have to go to their own drop zone, or collect their own eggs, or take out their own number of bugs, but it’s something. Inevitably there is some waiting around while every one finishes up their milestones for the current phase. It does give us all something to work towards together which is more than I can say for the normal game.

With that said, the expedition does kind of speed run you through the different features of No Man’s Sky that we haven’t seen before. Things like Frieghters, mechs, and other exocraft that can maybe serve as goals for us to chase together when we do go back to the main game. I still think the Nexus missions will give us more focused goals to persue together too, we just haven’t tried them yet.

My Blaugust State of Mind: Week 3 – wait, Week 4!?!

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Well, well, well, we’re a bit late for this post that was suppose to be published last Sunday aren’t we? Yes, yes we are….

But that’s ok, this whole positing daily thing was starting to drive me a little crazy. I felt like I fell behind and then couldn’t keep up. Quite frankly, I was starting to get a little obsessive. So I took a small break – okay a bigger break than I intended – and that felt great. It silenced the little gremlin in my head that said you can’t stop now you’re halfway to 31 posts! But I did stop, and now with a bit of a gap, a lot of self imposed pressure I was feeling went away. I notoriously drop off during the aptly named “Staying Motivated Week”, I tend to take too long of a break and then it’s September. Wasn’t trying to do that this year! (Nearly did though…)

This leads me to one of those lesson’s I tend to learn every year. Daily blogging isn’t for me. It’s a fun challenge but it’s not sustainable for me. Especially coming off of a, more or less, 2 year blogging break. I’ve been trying to find some sort of posting schedule here since I started this thing. At this point, that just might be whenever I fell like it. Though, this event always shows me that I enjoy writing a whole lot and should try to do it more often.

As a whole, Blaugust has been good for me. I have written more in the last month than I have in the last two years which feels great. I’ve already exceeded the goal I set for myself in the beginning of all this. I’m feeling confident that I can finish the month strong with a few more posts!

This Week In Screenshots: Set to Music

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I’ve been listening to the Heart of Thorns soundtrack on the way to work this week. Only the first handful of tracks though, because I’ve found some can lead to some spoilers. I can, in fact I probably will, write a whole post on how I got into listening to game soundtracks on their own but…this is not that post. Just something short and sweet for Saturday.

Heart of Thorns has some great music and I thought it would be fun to match up some screenshots I took to the tracks I’ve enjoyed this week.

Hope you’re having a great weekend!

The Pact Laid Waste

The Jungle Provides

Jaka Itzel

Far From Home

Tarir, the Forgotten City

Into the Jungle

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I got a solid start in Heart of Thorns this week. I started the main story and ventured through the first two zones: Verdant Brink and Auric Basin. Neither of which I’ve fully explored yet. The story picks up right where the Living World Season 2 leaves off, naturally. There’s enough of a recap where I would have probably figured out what was going on if I didn’t go through Season 2 but I’m sure glad I did.

The first thing I noticed about this expansion? It’s freaking hard! Well, harder than Central Tyria was, for sure, and a bit harder than Dry Top and the Silverwastes. I did a quick Google search to see if this was the case or I was rusty after picking the game back up after a couple months. Google confirmed that Heart of Thorns is, indeed, harder than the core story. Apparently, it used to be even harder too! But I don’t mind, it’s forcing me to pay attention to what each new enemy does. Thematically, it makes sense too because we’re dropped in behind enemy lines on their home turf.

The zones are beautiful. I have a so, so, many screenshots! I really dig the untamed forest vibe with the lush greens and the tree filtered sunlight….amazing. Plus we’ve got frogs everywhere. Big frogs. Small frogs. Tree Frogs!

I’ve always heard how wonderful HoT’s vertical maps are. I thought I had some idea of what a vertical map was. Let me tell you, Verdant Brink was rough before I unlocked the gliding mastery. One minute I’d be happily cruising down a hill on my raptor, the next minute I’d be falling off a cliff to my death. It certainly made those first few moments in the jungle memorable.

I like the way the mastery system is laid out here. In the base game, the masteries nice, ok Auto Looting is very nice, but they felt like something to passively unlock while I was doing other things: i.e the main story post 80 or the living world stuff.

Masteries in Heart of Thorns, at least so far, unlock more features for getting around. Gliding helps you get places you couldn’t before, learning how to use the bouncing mushrooms let’s you get places you couldn’t before, the Exalted lore helps you navigate the world. Actually, I’m not sure on that last one, it least let’s you use the teleports in Tarir, which saves a few staircases!

I’m looking forward to getting that next mastery unlock to explore more than. I feel more inclined to explore in this expansion. That could be because I ran through Central Tyria so many times before but, I’m taking my time here.

In addition to masteries, I also like that the story (again at least so far) is broken up into a few missions and then a pause to unlock a new mastery. This has given me a chance to get familiar with the maps, hone my skills against the enemy types in the jungle, and run around and participate in events. It’s has some nice pacing to it, I haven’t felt like I’ve been itching to get back to the story before I’ve unlocked the next mastery.

I had read that the Hero Points were geared more towards multiple people completing them than the hero points in Central Tyria. They do provide ten hero points instead of one which might explain that. I thought I would have a problem completing these, but every time I started one up, there was always one or two people who came along and helped out. I’m looking forward to unlocking the Dragonhunter Elite spec and playing around with that!

Creator Appreciation Week: Parsec

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It’s Creator Appreciation Week here in Blaugust-land. In years past, I’ve used topical week to talk about podcast that I love. I haven’t been listening to many new podcasts as of late, so this year I’m switching it up and giving a shout out to Parsec. If you’ve never heard of Parsec before, it’s an extremely low-latency remote desktop application geared towards gaming. And it’s free for personal use!

My main use for it is using it to play games that don’t support online multiplayer. My friend group is spread throughout the US so we use it a lot to play couch co-op games like the teenage mutant ninja turtles game. We’ve also used it to play single player games in the “pass the controller” style while sitting on our virtual couch like Little Hope.

I’ve been using it for years and it has always worked as advertised. We still get some latency, nothing is perfect, but for the most part controls are smooth and the frames don’t stutter much. We’ve even used it to play a mildly successful run of Dark Souls 3 where each of us were in charge of a single control of the character. I was on attacking, Blades was on healing and dodging, and CC was on movement. It was wild!

It’s a nice application, and while it can have some weird audio issues with Discord sometimes, I haven’t found another program like it.

No Man’s Multiplayer

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Wilhelm’s No Man’s Sky post on Monday got me thinking about what kind of multiplayer experience No Man’s Sky actually gives it’s players. I tend to think that, while No Man’s Sky, has made so, so much progress since it’s release in 2016, the multiplayer experience hasn’t changed all that much.

Yes, before you tell me it didn’t have multiplayer when it launched, I know, I remember. I also remember it being weird that Sean Murray led players on that their might be days before the launch.

Spoiler alert, people tried to meet up, it didn’t exists. Queue the outcry!

Now it does have multiplayer,it has for years, and still it’s as true now as it was 8 years ago, “No Man’s Sky is not a multiplayer game.” Can I see my friends? Yes. Jump around with them? Yes. Fly spaceships near each other? Also yes. Talk to them through an in game voice chat that, for some inexplicable reason, has the options to turn it off buried in the Network settings of all places? Unfortunately, yes. I can do all of that but there’s nothing to do together per say.

90% of the time spent playing No Man’s Sky with the Squad this weekend consisted of the four of us landing on a planet and immediately running in opposite directions. We did our own thing while chatting in Discord. I was doing this in 2016 too, I just couldn’t see any of them in the game. The only interaction we had with each other was meeting up and trading some materials with each other. Then it was right back out to do our own thing again.

I think this all stems from a few fundemental reason.

First, the world(s) isn’t all that dangerous. There isn’t muchthreat from anything besides the environment which can, often times, be mitigated by having enough supplies to charge all your bars or jumping back in your ship while they recharge. There isn’t a place you’re going to stumble in to that’s going to require someone else’s help. You’re rarely attacked and even if you are, you can probably get yourself out of a bad situation easily.

Second, there aren’t any shared objectives. Similar to above, there just isn’t anything that requires someone else help. There’s also nothing that brings you to the same spot for an activity. You can follow your friend(s)around from point of interest to point of interest but opening the same box as your buddy doesn’t add any value to the experience.

This all make sense, because again, “No Man’s Sky is not a multiplayer game”. Turns out, when you slap multiplayer on a game years later, it might be lacking.

Now, this may just be me not “getting” survival sandbox multiplayer. I think Palworld suffers from the same issue. Great as a solo game, servicable with two people, unbelievably boring with more than that. I want to play with people not around them. No Man’s Sky doesn’t offer meaningful ways to play together.

7 Days to Die, on the other hand, has a great multiplayer experience. The world is dangerous, made less so with a few pals. There’s a shared common goal of getting ready and surviving the Blood Moon. There are even shared quests from the Traders now. There’s always some reason to be within sight of another player.

All this to say, I don’t think No Man’s Sky offers much of a multiplayer experience.

Admittedly, we haven’t gotten very far in the game so I to see what we could do together. There, I found a lot of the same sentiment. One thing that did come up was doing Nexus missions together from the Anomaly. We haven’t tried these yest so maybe it will add some structure and a common goal for us to work on together.

I also came upon discussions of the Glactic Hub Project. This bills itself as a multiplayer Civillization which sounds kind of neat. It reminds me of the player groups that formed in Elite Dangerous:

The Galactic Hub Project is a multiplayer organization based in the video game No Man’s Sky. Founded in 2016, the Hub is No Man’s Sky’s largest and oldest active civilization. Our community features social events, PVP, sports, economic opportunities, creative writing endeavors, construction projects, and so much more. The wide variety of available content in our space has attracted the construction of over 2,000 bases in Hub space every year since 2020.

Galactic Hub Wiki Page

Of course, no space fairing civilization is complete with it’s own cryptocurrency. I’m not kidding…

A Return to No Man’s Sky

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Over the weekend, the Squad made its triumphant return to No Man’s Sky. Everyone was eager to see what the new graphical update – well, looked like. I thought it might be cool to check out the new expedition too for something different.

In 2022, we started a save probably after the game was on some sort of Steam sale. We didn’t get very far evidenced by the fact that 3 out of the 4 of us hadn’t completed enough of the tutorial to get to the Anomaly, a kind of nomadic player/ upgrade hub fo the galaxy. It’s also, more or less, the end of the tutorial.

Apparently CC was using an old save since he had access to a freighter with an ungodly amount of raw resources. Which he judiciously doled out to the rest of us as needed.

I vaugely remember out last time through. We were making good progress I. the main questline when we landed on a planet with ancient bones all over the place. We stopped to check out what those were, then proceeded to strip mine the planet of its fossils to sell to the nearby space station for buckets and buckets of credits. As a result, loading in this weekend we all were rich and were greeted by some very stylish ships.

None of us could remember how to actually do anything. A good start.

Water planets are pretty now.

We puttered around for an hour, calling out key bindings when one of us stumbled upon them. Who wants to read through the keybindings in the settings right? The core mechanics of shoot things to gain resources paired with don’t let your bars deplete to zero came back fairly quick. I had some close calls while getting distracted and not replenishing my life support. But there are enough alarms and screen flashing to get your attention.

Toast and I didn’t have any launch fuel to get our ships off the planet so we set off to figure out how to do that first. Once we got that squared away, it was off to space to join up with CC and Blades on the freighter.

From there, we decided to check out the expedition. Now, you can start a new save file to go directly to the Expedition mode, but the Squad lies to do things the hard way. There’s another option to start the expedition from your current save via the Anomaly. We didn’t know this at the time, but this gives a slight advantage because you get to bring along some resources and technology from your current save along to pick up at a later time. The problem was, most of us didn’t have access to the Anomaly. We tried having CC call it in for all of us but it just doesn’t work like that.

Off we went to complete the main quest so we could all get access.

Waiting for Blades to get to the Anomaly

We weren’t far off. We had to build the warp drive to jump to another star system. Then do some exploring from planet to planet to get an event to trigger so we could meet up with the Anomaly. Once we had access, we had to run around and talk to everyone to fully unlock all the stations and vendors there. Then, and only then, could we start the Expedition. We didn’t have enough stuff to bring in to it so we all chose to start fresh.

The Liquidators Expedition focuses on combat which isn’t something I associate with No Man’s Sky. The only combat I’ve done is shooting at some Sentinels when they don’t like what I’m mining and attack. The expedition, on the other hand, comes with mutant bug creatures to shoot! Fun fact, the Sentinels still don’t like it when you shoot the bugs even in self defense. So my first encounter included running from bugs and the space police! They started it!

Not the most comforting sight when you wake up from a shipwreck

What was nice is that this game mode seems to assume you’ve played before. There’s a shortened version of the tutorial where you have to get your ship operational by collecting materials but you don’t have to go through much else to get going. This was a bit of a challenge because the planet we started on didn’t have much in the way of Oxygen plants which we needed to fix our ships. It took us all a good 20 minutes of running around to get enough of it.

With ships fixed, we went to space to find another planet to collect enough things to sell to buy Microprocessors for the warp drive. Along the way, we found a derelict freighter which turned out to be one giant box of loot. We spent the rest of the night running through the frieghter opening all the boxes and selling all the loot to the station. Now we all have warp drives and we’re ready really dig in to the expedition this week!

My Blaugust State of Mind: Week 2

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Hello out there! I don’t usually post on the weekends but during Blaugust I find that having some sort of re-occuring feature helps cover those days. So that’s what this is.

We are now at the end of week two, our first full week of Blaugust. Traditionally. “Lessons Learned” is the theme of the last week. However, I find that most years I’m wracking my brain to figure out just what I’ve learned. Often times, I seem to learn the same lessons year over . Maybe that’s because I always read my old Lesson Learned posts before I write a new one. Maybe I’m just prone to forgetting….Yeah, it’s probably that’s.

So this year I thought I would jot down some of my thoughts around the event each in the hopes that I might find some new wisdom at the end of all this.

  • Every year, I feel like I start to think about blogging differently around day 3 of the event. I find myself thinking about writing more often, brainstorming ideas in my downtime, and reading other blogs way more than I typically would the rest of the year. Nothing has changed here, I’m still doing all of these this year.
  • By the time this post goes live, I will have increased my post count for the year by 11 and exceed my post count for last year. That’s not bad, considering before Blaugust I hit publish on a grand total of 2 posts! It’s been fun getting back in to a routine this week. It’s a nice feeling to be creating something again rather than just consuming.
  • I’m definitely starting to feel that tug to write every day. Slowly but surely building that habit. Even if it is just for this month.
  • I ran out of scheduled posts halfway through the week. Kind of feel like I’ve been treading water ever since. 31 posts in 31 days is an aspiration for sure but, given that I’m still in the running, I might as well go for it if life permits. I’m taking this weekend to build up another set of posts to get back to that comfy buffer.
  • There are more blogs this year that are out of my typical reading scope. I’ve made a Blaugust feed separate from my Gaming feed to make sure I don’t skip out on these. Since I spend most of my time hanging around the gaming blog corner of the internet, it’s nice to see tons of personal blogs out there covering a wide variety of topics. Through some of these, I’ve been introduced to the concept of the IndieWeb which I’m finding really interesting the more I dig in to it.
  • As I suspected, getting back to writing has gotten me back to gaming.